It’s worked, y’all! I’ve been able to rest for several days in a row. That’s pretty great for me. Even if nothing external is pushing me to work, I have a strong internal drive to do so, which makes actually resting tedious and difficult for me. But I’ve been doing it!

It’s helped that I’ve been very slowly and meticulously been working on and off on a HUGE, HUGE image. I mean, it’s seriously 6-7 times as large as a regular photo I’d edit. It’s SO big, in fact, that although I shot the (many) images which make up this composite, I had to wait until I upgraded my laptop earlier this year before I could really work on it. It would crash not just Photoshop, but my entire computer after about 15 minutes worth of work before… usually as I was trying to save it. So it’s a big ol’ project that’s going to take a long time, but it’s been strangely soothing to just dib and dab at it as the mood struck over the last few days. Doesn’t matter how much I get done or not because I’m on vacation! 🙂

This is one of the photos I took. The farm was so BEAUTIFUL. It felt absolutely idyllic. I can’t remember the breed of these dogs, so they might have been Maremmas. Regardless, these are livestock guarding dogs. They spend pretty much their whole lives with the flock they protect so that even the flightiest of animals are so used to them being there they can actually be useful. These dogs were quite polite but I’ve seen other LGDs who will give you the stink eye as soon as they notice you and “suggest” that you move along.

Well. The main part of this post is SERIOUSLY overdue. Last June, I finally found (after months of searching) a farm with sheep on it, and a farmer who would allow me to come photograph his lambs. Enter Terry of Task Farms, near Palmdale! He was an exceptionally kind man and agreed to let me come hang out with his animals and take pictures of them. He had one lamb left from the lambing season, a black and white little girl named Too Cute (and she was). We hurried to schedule the shoot before she grew any more!

Since it was going to be a bit of a drive and it had been so hard for me to find, I figured it might have been difficult for other people, so I emailed my friend Brooke Shaden and asked if she needed photos of sheep. She happily joined the party, along with Katie Johnson to model for us both and Meredith Lynn, who bravely volunteered to meet us in Palmdale, take behind-the-scenes photos for us before driving back to Los Angeles and work a full day’s work at her job. Have I mentioned that we were planning to be at the farm by dawn? Everyone who came was a real trooper for getting up so early and not complaining, but my goodness, I didn’t envy poor Meredith that day!

Photo by Meredith Lynn. Laying in the dirt for a photo! That’s not really too uncommon though.

It was decided that Katie would drive Brooke and myself since Brooke and I both have fibro and/or ME and Katie has… whatever the opposite of that is. She’s pretty much always full of energy.

Photo by Meredith Lynn. This is my favorite hoodie ever because not only does it have a cool pattern and pretty colors, but I wore it on my first date with Geoff.

The BTS shots she got were so wonderful though and I’ve been eagerly waiting for me to finally get through editing all the images I shot at the farm so I could post her photos here! I ended up shooting a bit more than I’d planned on shooting, which made the turn-around of all the images being done take much longer, especially as other things kept popping up which required more immediate attention. But my images are finally all done! Most of them you’ve seen already, but the most recent one will be new to you.

Photo by Meredith Lynn

Terry emailed me a few days before we were going to be at the farm with a photo of a 30-minute-old baby goat and suggested we might want to include him in our shots. YES. YES WE DO, TERRY! It was such an adorable, sweet, floppy little thing, we all had to take turns holding him. He was still a little sleepy and he made the most precious little mewling noises that just melted your heart. I had to remind myself very hard that I did NOT need to take him home and raise him like my own. (But how CUTE would it be if he slept in the bed with Geoff and me?? Geoff would probably not think it was cute, but I would!!)

Photo by Meredith Lynn

Photo by Meredith Lynn

The initial spark of inspiration that led to the whole search for a lamb was a DreamWorld image I wanted to take with my grandmother in it. At the farm, Katie posed with Too Cute in a similar costume and pose that I would later photograph my grandmother in (I was not going to make her drive to Palmdale before dawn) and it was a pretty easy job to merge the two images together in Photoshop later.

Photo by Meredith Lynn

That was the main image I’d needed to get out of the day, so after that, we played around on the farm with the animals for a while. Especially the baby goat. I may need to drive back out to Terry’s farm again soon just to hold another baby goat. It is impossible to put into words how wonderful it felt to hold the baby goat and hear the little grunty noises he made.

Photo by Meredith Lynn. Making Brooke and Katie look destitute.

Photo by Meredith Lynn

I owe a great big THANK YOU to Meredith for coming along and getting such great BTS photos for us! Despite how long it’s taken me to post them, I am so glad I have them! What a beautiful way to remember a fun, adventurous morning 🙂 I’ll share a few of the BTS shots I grabbed between photos and then you can see the entire set of edited Task Farm Photos!

A friendly pony.

Geese who were somewhat alarmed by our presence. I understood how they would have been able to be responsible for alerting the guards of early Rome that enemies were afoot and gave them just enough time to defend themselves.

There were cool things like this ALL OVER the place! It was really a photographer’s dream.

Terry even provided an authentic shepherd’s crook for the photo Katie is getting ready for!

Lastly, one more photo by Meredith Lynn! She very thoughtfully got a group shot of all of us together, including farmer Terry, the baby goat and his border collie!

Before we left, Terry let us watch a demonstration of how his border collie can herd the sheep, which is always an amazing sight to behold. Single-word commands, whistles and other simple noises convey a whole range of communications to a well-trained dog (which Terry’s is). Even though it took me a while to recover physically from the adventure, I hope I can go back some day and see more of this! And hold more babies, of course 🙂

Promise

Of Milk and Honey

The Only Daughter

The Shepherdess

And finally, the very last image which I took forever to get to and which held up this post the most… a new addition to my Dustbowl series, featuring Katie Johnson, Brooke Shaden and the baby goat!

Last Possessions

Thanks for reading! If you are in the LA area and have any need for sheep, livestock which won’t end up on anyone’s plate, a farm, a very kind farmer, or a place to train your dog in the art of sheep herding, I can’t recommend Task Farms enough! Thanks again to Terry, Katie, Brooke and Meredith for all helping to make the day possible and very fun!!

How was everyone holiday and new year’s celebration? Geoff and I had the chance to take a little road trip to see some family, which was really fun! We got to hit some stops coming and going we’d been wanting to see for a while, so I’ll just get right into it.

First stop was the Arizona Deer Farm! I visited the deer farm with my family when I was about 4 or 5, and I remember it quite vividly. I was very excited to realize that not only was the place still around, it was pretty much right on our way! It’s more of a large petting zoo than a farm per say, and they encourage photographs to be taken. I have a series coming up which is taking a lot of inspiration from deer, so it was very much a win-win situation for me! Thanks to Geoff for taking all the photos that have me in them!

There’s a path for people to walk on, and most of the deer mill about freely inside a large enclosure. They have plenty of places they can go and hang out or take a nap that are well off the path, so they only are interacting with you if they want to. And since you get a big cup of feed when you go in, many of them want to 🙂

Most of the deer are fallow deer; as you can see, they don’t get terribly large, they come in a variety of beautiful colors, and they retain their fawn-like spots into adulthood.

The price of food: one smooch on the head. This one thought it was a fair trade.

Checking my hair for edibility; sorry, buck.

Sadly, my coat is also not edible.

The males have the most stunning antlers of any deer I’ve seen! I took lots of photos of this handsome gentleman.

Once we arrived safely in Kansas, we settled in to the cold weather. They had an unusual amount of snow for this time of year, which was sighed at by all the locals but I rejoiced in. We met up with Erick Riedell, a friend of Geoff’s since Junior High, who also got ordained and married us, and who is also a photographer. In addition to being an all-around great guy, he’s a cancer survivor twice over now. He had volunteered to be a part of DreamWorld while we were back, and I wanted to find a way to honor his battle and triumphs… hopefully I’ll be able to share the result of that shoot soon!

While we were wandering around a snow-covered wood for the shoot, I was enchanted by the fairy-world sparkle the snow gave all the plants. I snapped this shot, which reminded me of the fairy tale of The 12 Dancing Princesses and the underground world where all the trees and fruit are made of jewels.

Little Jewels

On our way back home we stopped at the Wigwam Motel, the epitome of Route 66 kitsch. We’d stayed there once before, and while the rooms are humble, they are so fun to stay in! It looks like very little has changed since it opened in 1950.

A cellphone snap of our wigwam. Those are my gloves on the car trunk, not a wad of used tissues as it appears.

As we made our way home from Arizona, we stopped at The Roadkill Cafe, another historic Route 66 stop. They had great food (which was not at all made out of roadkill) along with a lovely hand-drawn sign honoring the fallen Hotshot firemen. I had an unsettling moment when I saw the sign; my heart sank at the reminder of all the brave souls who were lost that day, but I loved that the cafe was honoring their lives and memories. Regular readers will remember why the loss was hard for me.

So now… on to the first photo of the year! As much as possible, I feel it’s important to start a year off right with my photos. Get going on a direction that will determine a positive trajectory. I wanted my first photo of 2014 to be one I’d look back on proudly. This photo ended up being quite a bit more work to edit than I’d expected, but I felt waiting a little longer would be worth it.

This concept was actually one I’d shot with Katie at our very first shoot many months ago, but it just didn’t turn out quite like I’d wanted. The concept was a DreamWorld character; a wind spirit, or perhaps wind goddess would be more appropriate.

I started by making her an art nouveau-inspired headdress. I remember I’d been looking at one of my books on Alphonse Mucha and had wanted to make a headdress similar to what many of his women are adorned with.

I used my foam head to pin and hot glue sensual, looping ribbons into a headband shape. The forehead and sides were decorated with masses of little white flowers and small glitter-covered styrofoam balls in a variety of sizes.

It was meant to be worn rather low over the forehead, which almost instantly gave it that art nouveau feel.

After that, I hot glued long strands of ribbon to the headband and dotted them with a few more of the styrofoam balls which would help show the blowing wind, along with making it feel more magical.

The second shoot went much better than the first one did!

Where Earth Meets The Sky

Where Earth Meets The Sky – detail

Katie always plays ethereal goddess-types so easily! Her acting chops are so important to the kind of photography I do. We both would like to see this kind of headdress become fashionable so we could just go around wearing them all day, at, say, the grocery store… so how about it? Would you like a wind goddess headdress of your own to help start a trend? 🙂

Thanks to Katie for her patient modeling and to all my readers! I hope your year has been off to a great start!

It’s that time of year when everyone with a blog is required to take a look at the previous year and take stock. I like this tradition. It gives you a sense of accomplishment for the things you’ve done and also brings to mind what still needs attention.

I created what I consider the first “real” DreamWorld piece. By “real” I mean a full-fledged character was brought to life with costumes and props which took months to create and inventing new ways to bring about my vision on a shoe-string budget. The inclusion of birds would also prove to be a frequently occurring theme in DreamWorld.

The Court Of The Dryad Queen

I got to photograph Lauren Cohen, aka Maggie from AMC’s The Walking Dead. The image also kicked off a sub-series of DreamWorld portraying the various steps along the Hero’s Journey.

Crossing The First Threshold

I also got to photograph Paul Telfer, known for his roles in NCIS, The Vampire Diaries and other roles that require buff-and-handsome men. He perfectly portrayed the angelic kind of being you would want watching over you while you sleep.

Prayer For The Frail

This year also brought about a new, ongoing collaboration and friendship with actor/model Katie Johnson. I could write an entire post about how wonderful it’s been to have Katie in my life, both for artistic reasons and personal ones. I will leave it at two main points; that she is a spectacular model, equally skilled at following specific, minute directions as well as being let loose while I just try and keep up with her. Her friendship, strength and grace have been a great boon this year, especially during some notable rough patches. Thank you, Katie 🙂

In a somewhat similar vein, I took my passion for animal rights to a new level after watching the documentary Blackfish. This also meant that I finally tackled underwater photography, which I’d been quite nervous about trying.

I visited a sheep farm to take photos of lambs and goats along with friends Katie and Brooke Shaden, to create a very personal portrait of my grandmother. This particular lamb was appropriately named Too Cute 🙂

I “celebrated” my 5-year anniversary with ME. I’ve tried many new therapies this year to combat the ME, but with the exception of ART massage, it has gotten slowly worse and finally forced me to quit my day job. In some ways this is a good thing, as my day job was doing my body no good at all, and it also means now I can concentrate fulltime on art. But it’s also a bit frightening; will the ME get a little worse every year? Will it level off now that I’m not pushing it trying to hold down a job? There are many unknowns, which can be worse than knowing something bad will happen. I try and keep a good attitude about things, but it’s also no good trying to simply ignore your fears. They won’t go away, they’ll simply grow in the dark.

Vanity’s Murder

This TED Talk sums up my fears, hopes and trials beautifully, and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone, especially any who struggle with depression.

But perhaps very best of all was getting to photograph author Peter S. Beagle, of The Last Unicorn fame, and bring him into DreamWorld as its King. It was such a tremendous amount of work, but that just makes the resulting photos that much more meaningful.

Beloved Of The Crown

A year ago, I never would have thought I’d find myself not only merely talking to Peter, but actually interacting with him, making a costume for him, and casting him as one of the most important characters of DreamWorld.

Aerie

If that all happened in 2013, what will 2014 bring? I am very excited to find out!